He was inspired to write after his mom died.

Oct. 31, 2013
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Douglas Bauer

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Wonder of Words Festival

• Iowa native Douglas Bauer will speak about his new memoir, “What Happens Next: Matters of Life and Death,” at 4 p.m. Saturday at Central Library, 1000 Grand Ave., Des Moines, as part of the Festival. The event is free to attend.

• The 12-day festival includes a range of free and ticketed events in Des Moines, Indianola and Grinnell. Other highlights include NPR host Michele Norris on race (Wednesday at Drake University’s Sheslow Auditorium), former Register business columnist Dave Elbert on local history (Thursday at the Temple for Performing Arts), Iowa Poet Laureate Mary Swander on Iowa immigrants and family stories (Nov. 8, also at the Temple), best-selling author Amy Tan (Nov. 10 at Hoyt Sherman Place), state Sen. Rob Hogg on climate change (Nov. 12 at the Franklin Avenue Library) and an exhibition of miniature books from the Iowa Center for the Book (Friday through Nov. 30 at the Central Library). Find the complete schedule at www.wonderofwordsfest.com.

Autry, Pederson tell stories about gratitude all year long

Jim Autry and Sally Pederson will discuss “Choosing Gratitude 365 Days a Year” on Monday at noon at Central Library, 1000 Grand Ave. The event is free to attend.

Jim Autry of Des Moines was encouraged by the reaction to his 2012 book “Choosing Gratitude,” personal essays of how the former Meredith Corp. executive turned his frustrations of life around by following the words of his late grandmother: “Count Your Blessings.” He described his morning “gratitude walks,” counting those blessings as he went, that changed his attitude and led to many examples of grateful life moments.

By small-press standards it sold well, becoming a local bookstore best-seller. Four hundred people packed in the library to hear him speak. And he landed a guest appearance on the national show “Moyers & Company,” with Bill Moyers, one of the country’s most revered journalists.

The other reaction was even more meaningful. People told him they were using the book for daily meditation readings. It gave him an idea that became a new book, “Choosing Gratitude 365 Days a Year.”

He enlisted the help of his wife, Sally Pederson, the former lieutenant governor of Iowa who once worked with Autry at Meredith as an editor at Better Homes & Gardens magazine.

Autry and Pederson ramble through the days of the calendar, and really their lives, alternating stories of gratefulness for friends and family but also for helpful people and war veterans, for books and dancing, playfulness and passion. At the end of each day, they give an idea of what to be grateful for, and we all need help in that. It’s refreshingly barren of the trite “self-help-ese,” and filled with simple, heartfelt actions and ways of thinking.

Thanks to this book, I dashed off a note of praise to a colleague (Autry’s Feb. 20 entry on appreciating co-workers) and contacted my sister for a long-delayed lunch (Pederson’s Feb. 21 entry on gratefulness for siblings). Which made me grateful for reading it.

— Mike Kilen

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Douglas Bauer had ably mastered aging. He had exercised vigorously, led a mentally stimulating life as a writer and university professor and enjoyed the emotional comforts of family with his wife, Sue Miller, a best-selling author.

So when the Iowa native, then in his early 60s, cluster-scheduled doctor visits for nagging annoyances — the trick knee, the cloudy vision, the odd heart beats — he irrationally imagined the quick body tune-up “would be as if I were doing away with the evidence that age had found me and had settled in to stay,” Bauer later wrote in his new memoir of essays, “What Happens Next,” (University of Iowa Press, $17).

But the day he a­waited cataract surgery in Boston, his aging mother in Iowa was lying in her own hospital bed in Iowa, one in which she would soon die.

“I was so struck by the coincidence of that, the metaphor of seeing the world clearly at the hour my mother died, that I felt duty bound to explore that metaphor, this dual calendar of her dying and my own mortality,” Bauer said in an interview prior to his Saturday appearance at the Central Library in Des Moines as part of the Wonder of Words Festival.

When a parent dies, what roars forth is a need to understand their lives as the clock suddenly seems to speed up.

“I remember at my mother’s funeral service, lined up at the sanctuary, oldest to youngest. There I was, first,” he said. “I just thought, ‘OK, barring some unusual circumstance, I am next.’ ”

Bauer, now 68, grew up in Prairie City, a small farming community just 20 miles down the road from Des Moines. He left for Chicago and a magazine job, and then returned to write about it in his acclaimed 1979 book “Prairie City, Iowa.”

It set forth a career as a writer in Boston and a college literature professor in Vermont, but he couldn’t leave Prairie City behind. The small-town characters emerged in his novel “The Book of Famous Iowans,” and here he was again, this time with a subject even closer to heart — his extended family.

“I didn’t want it to be sentimental,” he said. “That would not honor them.”

He explored his Iowa parents’ lives and marriage, “its early excitement, its subsequent years of anger and frustration, its brooding culmination, its baffling coda of her first affection’s return.”

To say that such a memoir is challenging is an understatement. But to do it honestly leads to what author Andres Dubus III (“The House of Sand and Fog”) would call some of the finest personal essays he has ever read.

Bauer’s mother carried anger from early on, frustrated at her place on the farm, and had a critical eye toward her husband, who withdrew to the fields. His maternal grandfather was often soused in a raucous home that, he wrote of weekly Sunday family gatherings, “was wonderfully soiled and malodorous and filled with a clannish liveliness that somehow relied on, somehow got its strength from, that crudeness.”

From them he cultivated tenacity, and from this country town a quiet ruggedness. But because he also needed to write of family frailties, he exchanged interesting emails with his brother, as can be expected.

“We have a different approach to coming to terms with our history,” Bauer said. “His was, ‘Who needs to remember that?’ Mine was, ‘I need to remember that.’ But we both came to be at peace with it.”

What he also dug up in the keepsakes and old photographs came as a surprise — an exuberance in his parents’ early lives before they settled into the domestic patterns a child remembers.

He visited the little apartment in Cheyenne where his parents lived before returning to the Iowa farm and recalled a young, dashing, partying couple. A lightness came to his mother’s voice, he now remembered, when she spoke of it.

He came to understand his mother’s routine and confined life on a few square miles of land that she rarely left, and in one of the book’s finest essays contrasted it with his lifelong friend, famous food writer Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, who drank up life and food and travel with abandon.

“It speaks to women’s lives, so separate and yet parallel,” he said. “Yet as we age and as our needs crystallize and become refined, they become more and more like each other.”

In the end, like us all, they end up prone and gowned, trying hard for breath.

Bauer doesn’t come to a grand peace of mind in facing this ticking clock. He has his eyes fixed, his knees scanned and his heart checked. The matter of who he is and where he came from is ongoing.

In one essay, he writes of an Iowa winemaker near his old hometown who struggled with growing grapes from California, their taste taking on too strong a flavor of the Iowa soil, and he wondered “how much Iowa to let in and how much to keep out.”

“I don’t claim that it’s a settled matter at this point,” Bauer said. “What I have tried to do is to feel very comfortable with parts that are still in me and parts that aren’t. I try not to regret either.”

By his own account, he let in a Midwesterner’s “observant instinct that is a little reticent, a little cautious,” and kept out “the rural world that I was not suited for,” the same one his mother struggled with.

“This is, in some way, a frustration for me because you like to think where you come from is in some way how you understand yourself in the world,” he said. “But what I came to was that being a farmer and a writer is very similar. The sense of isolation, being comfortable with delayed gratification and the way you are on your own to do the work.”

What he let in and kept out, then, may have come from his mother and father.